Coat my heart with poisoned thorns
by Arianna Scribbler
Summary: What if the incident in the Chamber of Secrets had had more lasting effects? 'Even snakes bleed red' part 1. (See notes for further details.) (Contains mostly consensual sexual violence between underage people.)


Author's note: I can't remember exactly where the idea for this AU came from, but the basic gist of it is as follows: Ginny bonded even more strongly with the soul fragment in the diary and it was able to jump into her right before Harry destroyed the diary, turning her into a horcrux in her own right. The sheer amount of time and emotion Ginny poured into the diary has allowed him to gain sentience and exist as a being in his own right even now that he is trapped inside her body. Other relevant detail for this particular ficlet: due to receiving the diary earlier in the summer and its having more influence over her, Ginny was sorted into Slytherin, which only allowed Tom a greater hold on her during the year. There will be more ficlets in this universe eventually, probably sooner rather than later, which will hopefully answer some questions and provide more background.

This ficlet is dedicated to Jess and to Ryn who encouraged me and said nice things about my portrayal of Tom.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter is the property of JK Rowling. I am merely playing in her sandbox.

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She doesn't remember a time before Tom. Intellectually she's sure there was one – ten years of time, in fact. She must have been a child once, must have run shrieking through the field behind her house and cried to her mother over skinned knees and hurt feelings. There must have been a point in her life when she looked up to her parents and her brothers, when she thought they would protect her from all ills, when she thought the world was no bigger than the Burrow.

It must have been a very long time ago.

When Ginny thinks hard she can remember the first words he ever wrote to her, the first greeting they exchanged, tentative on her part and cautious on his. He, she knows, remembers better than she does. There is still part of him that is covered in letters, a part where every word she wrote in his diary remains imprinted forever. Sometimes she imagines that if he had physical form of his own it would smell of parchment and taste of ink.

She dreams of him for the first time when she's thirteen and scared. They've reached a truce by then, an uneasy agreement to respect boundaries and avoid obvious wounds. She has learned to negotiate by now, her tongue tipped with acid and poisonous honey hidden beneath a childish exterior. Twin stresses of Tom and her fellow Slytherins have ensured that her childishness exists only as an outer shell. Were their circumstances different she knows Tom could wipe the floor with her in an argument without effort, but the body he inhabits belongs to her and she will not have it stolen again. Her will is strong and his thoughts are not his own. When she dreams he comes to her covered in messy penmanship and fixes her with flint-hard eyes and her touch leaves burn marks between the words. She wakes with a smile on her lips and invisible burns on her skin. He says nothing to her all day and she knows she's scored a point in the game she didn't even know they were playing. For Tom Riddle, everything is a game. For Ginny Weasley, it's all about the stakes.

The dreams come more often as she grows older and each time he submits to her touch. She knows even in the dream that he would never be so compliant, that he would never allow her to dominate him as she does in her imagination but still she savors the fantasies. Growing reputation or not she is still a Weasley in a house of snakes, still a girl in a world of adults, still a prisoner in her own body, and it is not often that she allows herself more than controlled anger. In her dreams, Ginny unleashes her fury.

In his dreams she screams until her voice is worn to nothing as he stands over her in triumph.

At fourteen she has her first kiss. It's wet and awkward and he hasn't brushed his teeth since the last time he ate. She smiles prettily at him – he's from an important family and will make a good ally if she finds herself needing one – and ignores the way Tom's sudden fury makes her thoughts fuzzy. She extracts herself from the boy's grip with a smile and an apologetic word and makes her way back to her room even as Tom makes her legs impossibly heavy and wrestles with her for control of her hands. Once in the safety of her bed she retreats into her mind and allows her own rage to take over. They hurl obscenities at each other, velvet covered words with impossibly sharp cores. By unspoken agreement they aim for the forbidden weaknesses and when they have worn each other down to nothing Ginny finds her bed soaked with unclaimed tears. She is shaking with hurt and exhaustion and residual rage while he has retreated as far from her consciousness as he can, leaving only feather-light pin pricks to mark his presence.

Neither dream that night.

Neither of them are ones for confessions, tear-filled or not. Tom makes his opinions clear through actions or, when the physical world is forbidden to him, through perfectly aimed comments and rushes of manufactured emotion. Ginny draws on his charisma and her courage to bypass subtlety – the best defense against those whose every word is a lie is to speak nothing but the truth. When they speak to each other they bypass words entirely and spar with feelings and memories and a shared repertoire of experience. She learned early to use his own memories against him, and he can manufacture false emotions so convincing she once accused him of being human after all. They are nothing if not well matched. And so when Tom decides that he wants her to scream in more than just his dreams he does not hesitate to steal her body from her, and when Ginny burns to see marks on his skin it is her own flesh she mars. By the time she is sixteen years old and a match for him in age as well as in mind he can make her cringe with a touch and she can draw a whimper from his lips with a white-hot burst of emotion.

Ginny does not kiss any more boys, nor does she experiment with those young women who catch her eye and beckon invitingly. She does it not to placate the man in her mind but because anyone else is but a pale imitation, any touch but his a grotesque parody of what could be. She retreats into her mind at night and allows him control over the body as he finds all the right places to make them both ache in the morning. He loses his English in the heat of the moment and it is with her voice that he cries out in the tongue of the snakes. She steals into his thoughts to understand his words and stores them away to use for later. When he allows her use of her vocal chords she mimics the words back at him and loses herself in the rush of lust-tinged anger he feels at hearing a blood traitor use the language of his ancestor.

Before Tom Riddle Ginny was someone else, someone who might have grown up to be great in her own right. With him, she has become deadly, and green brings out the harshness in her eyes.


End file.
